Picky and demanding audiophiles - the kind of people who live to hear the shimmering trebles surrounding the piano chords on Coldplay's "Politik" - now shun MP3s. They're into SHNs, or Shorten files. Unlike MP3s, SHNs are lossless, which means they compress WAV files without sacrificing bass or treble. The obscure hero of the format is British scientist Tony Robinson, who created it to compress audio data for speech recognition research. He had no idea hundreds of thousands of music fans would adopt the technology almost a decade later as a standard for trading live concert recordings. "He's worshiped like a god in certain circles," says Diana Hamilton, a Baltimore research chemist who as a hobby maintains a SHN resource site. SHNs aren't likely to catch on in peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa anytime soon: A typical two-hour concert requires a 1-Gbyte transfer, about 50 hours of download time for a dialup user. But the files are staples in chat room-style communities such as SHNapster and Furthur. Of course, Robinson wouldn't know: He wouldn't list his favorite musicians, much less admit to using his own technology to trade bootlegs.
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